Estimation of the Volume of the Left Ventricle From MRI Images Using Deep Neural Networks

Segmenting human left ventricle (LV) in magnetic resonance imaging images and calculating its volume are important for diagnosing cardiac diseases. The latter task became the topic of the Second Annual Data Science Bowl organized by Kaggle. The dataset consisted of a large number of cases with only systole and diastole volume labels. We designed a system based on neural networks to solve this problem. It began with a detector to detect the regions of interest (ROI) containing LV chambers. Then a deep neural network named hypercolumns fully convolutional network was used to segment LV in ROI. The 2-D segmentation results were integrated across different images to estimate the volume. With ground-truth volume labels, this model was trained end-to-end. To improve the result, an additional dataset with only segmentation labels was used. The model was trained alternately on these two tasks. We also proposed a variance estimation method for the final prediction. Our algorithm ranked the fourth on the test set in this competition.